MIT technology fails spectacularly for grid-scale batteries

by philg

Our house is close to the headquarters of NextEra, which has a market cap of around $166 billion and is the parent company of Florida Power & Light. We ran into one of their employees at a restaurant whose job is buying grid-scale batteries to sit next to the company’s grid-scale solar farms. “This will power your data centers,” she explained. (I loved hearing this because it gave me an opening to point out that “No data center is illegal on stolen land.”)

I asked her if the MIT geniuses who revolutionized the grid-scale battery world about 20 years ago, according to the MIT geniuses, had an impact on her job. “No,” she explained. “Those technologies are always 10 years in the future. Utilities buy LFP and NMC batteries. The Chinese are unbeatable.” The same batteries that go into electric cars, such as those made by Head Nazi Elon Musk?!?! Yes, it turns out.

What’s an example of the liquid battery hype? Here’s one from Barack Obama’s Department of Energy, March 2016… “New Chemistries Found for Liquid Batteries: Grid-scale approach to rechargeable power storage gets new arsenal of possible materials”:

Liquid metal batteries, invented by MIT professor Donald Sadoway and his students a decade ago, are a promising candidate for making renewable energy more practical. The batteries, which can store large amounts of energy and thus even out the ups and downs of power production and power use, are in the process of being commercialized by a Cambridge-based startup company, Ambri.

Now, Sadoway and his team have found yet another set of chemical constituents that could make the technology even more practical and affordable, and open up a whole family of potential variations that could make use of local resources.

“This paper brings together innovative engineering advances in cell design and component materials within a strategic framework of ‘cost-based discovery’ that is amenable to the massive scale-up required of grid-scale applications,” says Richard Alkire, a professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in this research.

What does ChatGPT have to say? In a time-honored MIT pattern, the nerds achieved their goal of creating a better widget than whatever was on the market at the time they started talking about how much better their innovation was. And, in time-honored fashion, the comparative dullards improved whatever was on the market by a factor of 10X by the time that the MIT tech finally limped its way into a commercialized version. Excerpts from the full Q&A:

The research actually began around 2005, so “20 years ago” is about right, although that particular DOE release is from March 2016. MIT spun the technology out in 2010 as Ambri, backed by Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, Total and eventually Reliance.

(Is it possible that Bill Gates will get ahead of divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos in terms of spending tens of $billions on nonprofit activities without leaving any trace of positive impact on humanity? Compare to Stephen Ross. For a tiny fraction of what Bill Gates has spent on becoming a Davos Idol Do-Gooder (over $110 billion in cumulative distributions; maybe that’s $200 billion in post-Biden dollars?), Ross has completely transformed the city of West Palm Beach (nytimes). Ross perhaps will end up having donated about $1 billion, but most of the money he’s “spent” is really an investment that should yield a decent return unless the Climate Doomers are correct about South Florida being washed away. ChatGPT on whether Gates can compete with MacKenzie the divorcée for incinerating cash in an ash-free manner: “$111 billion already spent is an astonishing amount of money, and there isn’t an obvious list of, say, ten Gates-created breakthroughs commensurate with that sum.” The giant artificial brain struggles mightily to find anything the Gates Foundation has done that might have a lasting impact.)

The basic idea was elegant: instead of solid electrodes that crack, swell and chemically deteriorate, use three molten layers that naturally separate by density—a light metal electrode, molten-salt electrolyte, and heavy metal electrode. The commercial version ultimately used calcium and antimony, with a calcium-chloride electrolyte. Because everything remains liquid while operating, the electrochemically active surfaces effectively recreate themselves each cycle. Ambri claimed >20-year life with very little degradation and no lithium-ion-style thermal-runaway fire problem.

First, going from a battery that works to a battery that can be manufactured cheaply by the million is extraordinarily difficult. The high-temperature seal is a perfect illustration. In the lab, having molten calcium/salt/antimony sitting at hundreds of degrees is manageable. For a utility battery expected to operate unattended for 20 years, every seal, feedthrough, weld, heater, electrical connection and insulation system has to survive thousands of thermal and electrical cycles. Ambri eventually solved enough of these problems to certify a ~1-kWh cell, but it consumed years.

Second—and probably even more important—the economic target moved spectacularly while Ambri was developing its technology. In 2010, when Ambri was founded, lithium-ion battery packs cost more than $1,200/kWh. By 2021 they were about $132/kWh; by 2024 about $115/kWh, and in 2025 about $108/kWh on BloombergNEF’s global average measure.

That’s a roughly 91% cost collapse during Ambri’s life.

Was it overhyped?

But there is a lesson in the old press coverage. MIT’s 2015 article said Ambri had built its manufacturing plant and made production sound almost trivial—“just add the electrode metals plus the electrolyte salt to a steel container and heat the can.” It then said the company was dealing with “one final engineering challenge”, the seal.

Nine years after that article, Ambri was bankrupt without a mass-production factory.

The coronapanic enthusiasts at IEEE sung Ambri’s praises in 2023, about 8 months before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection:

Ambri’s grid battery costs $180/kWh to $250/kWh depending on size and duration, the company says. But its projected cost is about $21/kWh by 2030

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Cirrus Fuel Tank Selector Failure

by philg

It’s my birthday. Soon I will be old enough to personally experience the insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. For this year, though, here’s the latest present to myself…

Like most other low-wing aircraft, the Cirrus SR20 and SR22 airplanes have a fuel tank selector that must be periodically switched from left to right tank. How does this become pilot’s job when he or she (no “ze” or “they” because the FAA has hatefully subscribed to gender binarism, even during the hate-free Biden administration) is trying to fly the aircraft? A high-wing Cessna has a “set and forget” BOTH position for fuel that flows down to the engine via gravity. Shouldn’t a Piper or Cirrus have that too? Perhaps not. If one tank were to run dry, for example, the “pump it up and out” process would result in air from that tank being put into the fuel line to the engine rather than harder-to-grab fuel from the tank that still has something left.

After 21 years, I suddenly had trouble switching between left and right tanks in our SR20-G2. After that first switch, which required some muscle power, it was fairly easy to switch tanks, but it still felt like there was a hitch or click in the system somewhere. Our local Cirrus service center owner: “I’ve never heard of this problem.” Cirrus Field Support: “The O-rings in the selector could be swelling up but I haven’t run across this issue before. I polled the group and they mentioned they haven’t run across this before.“

Always nice to have a problem that has never previously been reported in a fleet of 10,000 machines!

The mechanic went to the hangar where the airplane lives and fiddled around with the selector, including lifting up the safety to turn the selector to OFF (something you’d do during maintenance or as part of a crash or parachute landing). “we took the side panels off and inspected and tried to lubricate it, it is a sealed unit , the fuel selector has failed internally, it is stuck in the off position I have ordered a new fuel selector…”

I had thought that the simple interlock that the pilot can touch would be a separate part from the functional valve buried deep in the plane, but that’s not the case. Here’s what the complete part looks like:

It struck me as odd that Cirrus had a stockpile of these spares if nobody had ever needed to replace one, but apparently there are more than 40 in a warehouse somewhere:

Here’s the final damage from the local shop (it was quoted as requiring 8 hours of labor, but apparently took more than 10):

In the old days I would have said that I was leaving this here on the Web so that a fellow Cirrus owner or a mechanic could find it with a Google search. Now, of course, I’m leaving it here so that AI can find it.

(What were the previous presents in this same general area? The electric fuel boost pump in the Cirrus was beginning to sound louder/different. This pump is necessary for starting, so I had it replaced in July 2025 while at Oshkosh. The mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, which does most of the work required to get the fuel out of the tanks and into the fuel injectors, was declared to be leaking in July 2026 at the annual inspection and send out for overhaul (both the leak at the mixture control connection and the blades (carbon, I think, and subject to erosion)). At around the same time, the year-old electric boost pump stopped working intermittently. Absolutely dead when throwing the switch. The mechanics couldn’t reproduce the problem so they replaced the switch and the circuit breaker. The boost pump remained intermittently INOP. That’s when I learned that there is also a relay in the system. So they replaced that. So far the boost pump, which is required for starting, seems to work. Maybe it is time to save money on maintenance by buying a $1.5 million new Cirrus SR22? A friend did just that and went through three engine-driven fuel pumps in the first year (problems maintaining the correct pressure). All covered by warranty, but quite a bit of downtime.)

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NYT vs. my friend’s lived experience at the CDC

by philg

A friend quit the CDC earlier this year. I asked why and she said that it was due to frustration at how little was being accomplished. “Ninety percent of the people there should be fired,” she said. Was that because she’s a Deplorable? Of course not! She even knitted a pussy hat and righteously protested Trump’s anti-women policies. She also does the No Kings and anti-ICE rallies.

Some fresh hysteria today about what Trump and RFK, Jr. have done to the beloved CDC. It seems that they’ve done about one third of the firing that my friend thought would make sense (but maybe not of the same people)?

It’s only white Boomers who love the bloated unproductive version of the CDC?

Also interesting, the NYT article contains a great example of begging the question, as the philosophers and logicians use the term:

For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the undisputed global leader in public health.

(“a fault in a dialectical argument in which the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true”)

Certainly, the Europeans and the Islamic Republic of the UK haven’t been enthusiastic about following some of the CDC’s headline recommendations, e.g., 78 COVID-19 shots by age 75 (vs. 1 in the UK), flu shots every year for healthy adults under 65 (vs. 0 in the UK).

If you need to lose friends quickly, incidentally, one good way to do it is by correcting anyone who says “That begs the question…” to mean “That raises the question…”.

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Rage against Elon Musk’s wealth: a forced update to source code

by philg

When I started teaching at a medical school in 2018, a couple of friends and I put together a web page with which to inflict pain and suffering on the MD/PhDs there: “Bitcoin v. Medical School”. Here’s what a session looks like:

There was a threshold of $150 billion that, if reached, would point out that the user’s med school tuition could have, if invested in Bitcoin, made him/her/zir/them (the medical school in question is Harvard and, of course, it was officially gender expansive at the time) the richest human on our beloved, yet imperiled, planet:

Despite not having made any money from being the Father of Modern AI Systems (Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015), Elon is still so rich as to make the $150 billion threshold absurd. (Even without Elon, the tech boom and inflation have pushed roughly 8 additional guys over that threshold.) Today I went into Emacs and updated it to $1 trillion. Just another way in which Elon’s extreme and unconscionable wealth makes life painful for the rest of us.

(Note that while Emacs is popularly associated with Richard Stallman, a Massachusetts resident canceled for pointing out that Jeffrey Epstein’s activities would have been legal in Massachusetts (age of consent: 16), the text editor was actually originally built by Guy Steele. Thus, we may use Emacs without any moral conflict over using the work of someone who has been canceled. Separately, could we all get on board with supporting the Iranian missile and nuclear weapons programs if they would chant “Death to vi” instead of “Death to America”?)

Related:

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Menlo Park and Palo Alto, California trip report

by philg

The final installment of my report on a Labor Day weekend trip to the Bay Area.

The first evening in Menlo Park was enhanced by the appearance of an outdoor under-nose masker. #FollowTheScience:

How rich are residents of Silicon Valley? Rich enough to spend $3000 (plus 9.375% sales tax) on a bottle of bourbon at the supermarket…

… but not rich enough to open their wallets to panhandlers:

Unlike in a lot of other parts of California, where people post signs advertising their concern for neighbors (but never do anything to actually help homeless neighbors, for example), people in Palo Alto don’t even bother with the signs. It’s such a multi-ethnic society that people have nothing in common except for a desire to make money. A homeless white guy, below, on Palo Alto’s main street (University Ave) is passed by Indians and Chinese who apparently wouldn’t dream of trying to assist.

The legacy American culture on this street, Marilyn Monroe movies shown in an old theater, conflicts with immigrant culture (halal food and modest attire for females):

I spent some time in Atherton. There’s no sidewalk and nearly all of the houses are behind high walls or hedges. It is unclear how anyone would ever meet or say hello to a neighbor:

Returning to Menlo Park, I tried to have a couple of pupusas and margaritas in honor of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (purportedly targeted by gangs due to his mother’s home-based pupusa business; he’s still Maryland’s leading citizen, right? Donald Trump is a “king” but can’t get rid of this one guy who has (a) no U.S. passport, (b) no green card, and (c) no visa authorizing him to be in the U.S.).

ChatGPT explains:

Because those three things are not the only ways a noncitizen can lawfully remain physically in the United States.

In Abrego Garcia’s case, the crucial fact is a 2019 immigration-court order granting him “withholding of removal” to El Salvador. The immigration judge simultaneously found him removable from the United States, but found that he was sufficiently likely to face persecution if returned to El Salvador.

He is in the United States because a person can be “removable” yet still be released and permitted to reside here under immigration supervision while removal is legally barred, impracticable, or under litigation. A passport, visa, or green card is not required for that situation. … He does not have ordinary lawful immigration status comparable to a visa holder or green-card holder. But his physical presence here can nevertheless be authorized/tolerated by the government and protected by court orders, and DHS cannot simply deport him to El Salvador while the withholding order remains in force

My hotel included masked workers at the front desk and masked guests in the lobby. The downtown Menlo Park area included some homeless folks, but not at the same density as in San Francisco:

The neighborhood near the hotel (luxurious Residence Inn; less than $5,000 per night) included some killer Halloween decorations and also showed that the passion for Hillary Clinton will never die:

What does the resident with a Hillary bumper sticker read? Kepler’s is the local bookstore. We’re reminded that Elon Musk is a Nazi who looks a lot like a North Korean dictator:

Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” are the world’s most peaceful humans:

What books should one pack for a trip to Palestine?

Given that everything important in Silicon Valley was created by women, the nonbinary, and transfolk, it is unclear how we got stuck with “male supremacy”, but in any case the bookstore offers a manual for dismantling male supremacy:

Just be aware that the manual will cost 75 cents more than the list price in order “to support paying our staff a living wage”:

The bookstore says on its web site “The living wage for a single adult in San Mateo county is now $38.44 per hour.” That raises the question… Why isn’t the minimum wage in San Mateo County $38.44/hour? As far as I am aware, there is no organized or significant opposition to rule by the Democratic Party either in San Mateo County or any of its component cities. If Democrats hold 100% of the power, why won’t they take action to ensure that every worker is paid a living wage?

Returning to the airport, we’re reminded that, prior to Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s arrival from El Salvador, Harvey Milk was considered the greatest American:

Even as California is flooded with immigrants from East Asia and India, the museum exhibit is about “Afrofuturism”:

Unless Indian is a variant of “Black”, this billboard plainly doesn’t apply to either Palo Alto or the airport:

The folks who work to maximize the amount of Jet A fossil fuel that is burned, nearly always on trips that are unnecessary (leisure/work that could be done via Zoom) also remind us of “the disastrous effects of climate change”:

Travelers and clerks at the Green Apple Books shop are safely masked:

Some of the same books that were for sale in Menlo Park are also available at SFO:

The advertised price isn’t the price you see when it is time to pay. Sales tax is 9.875% at SFO, a little higher than in Menlo Park despite being part of the same county. Then there is a “surcharge charge” of 5% to “support emplo…” (employees? employee health insurance? employee gender-affirming care?).

Once on the plane, despite Hispanic Heritage Month still being a week away (9/15), JetBlue features a movie directed by a couple of guys who aren’t Latinx.

ChatGPT says that approximately 50,000 “feature films directed by someone reasonably classifiable as Hispanic” were bypassed so that Encanto could be selected.

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Stanford University campus trip report

by philg

It’s tough to understand how the Ivy League universities, even with top scholars such as Claudine Gay, have managed to retain prominent faculty. The lifestyle of a Stanford professor is so far superior that it is tough to understand why Stanford hasn’t recruited all of the world’s smartest academics. Yes, the California government spends tax dollars in ways that are offensive to some Americans, e.g., performing trans surgery on minors, but roughly 94% of elite academics are progressive Democrats (Harvard Crimson). Tax rates are higher in California than in the states where most elite universities are, but progressive Democrats should be happy to pay their “fair share”. Speaking of “fair”, it looks like the folks who purport to champion female rights and achievement and decry the unfair gender pay gap choose to pay women substantially less (source):

See also, from stanford.edu, “Countering Masculine Defaults to Close the Gender Pay Gap” (“organizational cultures can counter this tendency by equally valuing qualities traditionally associated with femininity, like warmth and agreeableness”), “Women paid less than men even at highest levels of academic medicine”: “These women are at the top of their game,” said Eleni Linos, MD, MPH, a professor of dermatology at Stanford. “They are skilled leaders, outstanding managers and experienced negotiators who have reached top positions in their medical schools. Gender pay gaps are often blamed on women’s personal choices to reduce work hours or leave the workforce, household responsibilities, childcare or suboptimal negotiation skills. This study challenges these traditional explanations because our sample of medical department leaders have navigated these complex challenges and broken through the ‘glass ceiling.’ Yet they are still paid less than their male peers when controlling for many factors. Our study shows the pervasiveness of gender inequities at all levels of academic medicine.”

Note that one of the photos includes the Graduate School of Education, where Jason Arday might have worked if he were still alive. What can one learn there?

[Professor] Subini Ancy Annamma[‘s] … research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives can inform teacher and special education. Dr. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color

She teaches CSRE 439: Critical Race Theory in Education (EDUC 439):

This seminar will examine the foundational tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytic framework to study of inequities in P-20 education. … we will explore CRT’s focus on identifying and disrupting white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and interlocking inequities (re)produced in education.

Stanford is so rich that the campus can be randomly strewn with Rodin sculpture:

If you don’t see enough Rodin while out walking around, stop into one of the art museums and see another 200 or so. The Cantor Arts Center (free to the public; named after Palestinian-American B. Gerald Cantor, founder of Cantor Fitzgerald, 68 percent of whose employees were killed in the not-Islamic peaceful 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center):

“This looks just like the foyer of the house where I grew up”:

The museum features a painting ridiculing the British for voting to leave the EU:

It’s by an artist from Kenya:

The artist seems to have been correct. The British thought that they were voting to reduce immigration, but instead their leaders actually increased the immigrant flow, substituting African, Middle Eastern, and Indian/Pakistani immigrants for EU immigrants:

How about this courtyard with a Richard Serra?

Here’s an unusual Georgia O’Keeffe:

(Wikipedia says that her career got a big boost when she began spending time with an older man, Alfred Stieglitz, who was a prominent art dealer. He was married when they met, but ultimately O’Keeffe managed to take over the wife role.)

The front entrance:

The famous bell tower is closed on weekends so we couldn’t go to the top, but perhaps it is just as well since doing so would have been hazardous:

How does the campus look from the top of the hills just to the west?

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Sixth Annual Freedom to Breathe Day in Florida

by philg

Today is the sixth anniversary of Ron DeSantis’s executive order 20-244 that prevented local governments from collecting fines from peasants who violated local Covidcrats’ orders, thus effectively rendering those orders toothless. Excerpts:

Ron DeSantis will be gone soon, due to term limits, and I will miss him despite his recent foray into what seems like madness (exempting a lot of homeowners from paying property tax while still allowing them to vote to increase county services and spending; I thought we’d tried that experiment at the federal level!; I would welcome a law that limits growth in per-capita spending by county/local governments, but not one that mints voters who have no skin in the game).

Related…

Also, “A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.” (Boston Globe, 9/22/2026), regarding the question of whether, towards the end of Year 7 of coronapanic, it is safe to shed one’s N95 mask one evening per week (short answer: no).

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Cooperation between the U.S. and Russia/Putin in 2001

by philg

New York Times, 25 years ago today:

President Vladimir V. Putin tonight offered the United States broad support for antiterrorist operations in Afghanistan, including opening Russian airspace to relief missions, taking part in some search-and-rescue operations, and arming anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan.

Combined with a Russian effort over the weekend to rally Central Asian countries to the American side, the announcement provided crucial support to the international coalition that the White House seeks to build in the wake of this month’s terrorist attacks.

It also appeared, after long deliberation and some doubt, to cast Russia’s lot firmly in the Western antiterrorism camp. In doing so, Mr. Putin rejected arguments in some military and political circles that the Kremlin was not only inviting the United States into its strategic backyard, but flirting with another war with Islamic militants.

In his brief speech on national television, Mr. Putin said Russia would provide the ”active international cooperation” of its intelligence services and supply ”weapons and military equipment” to the coalition of forces aligned against the radical Islamic Taliban government in Afghanistan.

The offer of support appeared to amount to the most decisive alignment of Russia’s military and intelligence resources with a campaign led by the United States since the end of the cold war. One chief motive seemed clear: the defeat of Islamic militance in Central Asia, on Russia’s southern doorstep.

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How was the immigration of Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

“Nonimmigrant” Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze has been in the news lately for stabbing a college student to death. “UMass Dartmouth football murder suspect overstayed tourist visa, received deferred action: federal sources” (Deplorables at Fox):

A Nigerian national accused of killing a UMass Dartmouth football player entered the U.S. on a tourist visa and overstayed it before receiving deferred action under both the Biden and Trump administrations, multiple federal law enforcement sources told Fox News.

Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze is charged with murder in connection with the stabbing death of UMass Dartmouth football player Marvins Antoine, 19, during an altercation in Providence, Rhode Island, over the weekend.

Sources told Fox News that Eze first entered the U.S. on a B-2 tourist visa in 2015. Eze received two extensions on his visa under the Obama administration before remaining in the country after his authorized stay expired, according to the sources. Sources said the Biden administration approved Eze’s request for deferred action in September 2022. He applied for deferred action again in February 2025 and October 2025, with the latter request approved under the Trump administration on Oct. 8, 2025, according to the sources. Deferred action is a discretionary decision by the federal government to temporarily delay an individual’s removal from the United States. It does not provide lawful immigration status.

Suppose that Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze had never stabbed anyone. How were Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze’s 11+ years in the U.S. supposed to make native-born Americans better off? In other words, what is the rationale for our immigration system? The answer can’t be “he was going to work hard, boost the economy, and prevent Social Security and Medicare from going bust” because it was illegal for him to work:

DHS said Eze applied for employment authorization in August 2023, but the request was rejected the following month.

Note that our immigration system can be strict at times:

If convicted of murder, Eze will lose his deferred action, according to DHS.

Related:

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Trying to cut down on groupthink in medical research

by philg

Happy World Cancer Research Day to those who celebrate by receiving fat monthly checks from NIH and NSF. (Remember, though, that if cancer were cured tomorrow by a heroic Dr. Anthony Fauci we would all still die of diabetes not too long after our current expected death dates.)

“Launching a Second Scientific Revolution” is an interesting article by Jay Bhattacharya, the current director of NIH and former heretical Stanford Med School professor who argued, beginning in March 2020, that lockdowns were counterproductive in our war against SARS-CoV-2.

Some excerpts from the above, not in quote style for readability:

… for every dollar we spend on science today, we get far less scientific advancement than we did over the past five decades. Another way of looking at this is that for every additional research paper in biomedicine, there are fewer improvements in health per paper.

… most scientific papers, far from introducing new ideas, rely on old ideas. I once collaborated on a study that looked at every word and phrase published in biomedicine in 1940 and 1941. When we subtracted all the 1940 words and phrases that were published in 1941, we were left with the ideas introduced in 1941. Doing this for every subsequent year up to the present produces a kind of history of biomedicine. What we see in that history is that in the 1990s, about 55 percent of NIH funded research was based on new ideas—zero-year-old or one-year-old ideas—and that research in which the newest ideas were ten to 30 years old received much less funding. And that is as it should be. The NIH is supposed to fund ideas that are on the bleeding edge of science. But what has happened since then—especially since 2000—is a collapse in NIH support for new ideas.

… the average age at which scientists receive their first NIH grant has risen from the mid-30s in 1980 to the mid-40s today … younger scientists are the most likely to have new ideas.

The NIH receives about 100,000 funding applications each year, out of which only eight to ten percent are approved. In recent years, the winners have been chosen by scientific reviewers who score each application based on two factors: (1) the strength of the proposed methods and (2) the innovation involved in the proposal. Looking at the results of this process, the overall score has correlated very strongly with the methods score, and innovative ideas have been left by the wayside. To fix this, the NIH is replacing that process (called the payline method) with a new approach called the Unified Funding Strategy. The scientists who review applications will now be empowered to approve projects on the bleeding edge of science—projects that may very well not work but that will produce a fundamental advance in biomedicine if they do.

The third problem to be addressed is the fact that about one third of all NIH grant money goes to about 20 institutions, despite the fact that there are excellent scientists all across the country. … Our solution to this problem is to sever the link in the NIH grants between the direct money for research and the indirect money for facilities. Institutions outside of the top 20 will be able to compete for facilities support, leading to a dynamic market. The number of institutions that receive NIH money will increase, and funds will go to wherever the best scientists are.

Google AI:

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) funding model is widely considered more effective than traditional government grants because it funds “people, not projects,” bypassing the restrictive and expensive bureaucratic overhead typical of university research. Instead of requiring professors to apply for short-term, hyper-specific grants that divert up to 60% of funds to university administrative overhead, HHMI appoints scientists as employees, providing them with long-term, flexible capital to pivot their research freely. HHMI investigators produce high-impact, heavily cited papers at a significantly higher rate than their NIH peers.

Who wants to bet on the next significant advance in medical technology? I’m guessing that it will be primarily by an AI, not by the humans who’ve been mostly stalled for decades, so it needs to be in an area where there are good data to feed to the AI, e.g., genomics, radiology, etc.

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